


a candle or a heart

by daekie



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Cannibalism, Mild Gore, Nonbinary Character, Other, POV Second Person, Seeking Mr Eaten's Name (Fallen London), Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:20:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22058443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daekie/pseuds/daekie
Summary: King Twelve, they say, was wounded in the thigh. He was robbed of what will be. You may bring him a candle or a heart. Or you may fly; you may fly.(It has been said: in matters of the Bazaar, look to love, always.)
Relationships: Seeker of Mr Eaten's Name/Mr Eaten (Fallen London)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14





	a candle or a heart

There are so many types of love, they tell you - and, yet, the Bazaar may disregard all those but the romantic it sometimes seems, and leave the rest unaltered. Unchanged. To play out as they will, inevitably ending in tragedy, blood and flame and fire – perhaps it is folly. But you have never understood what love can be, except for watching its effects on others. You are free to do as you will, with your truest connections all consigned to the Well -

It’s possible, you think, that this is very much like that sort of love. But the Bazaar would much rather a story without the Runt, wouldn’t it? Oh, yes, lean in closer and listen; here is the symbol and the sign for _a wound that cannot be healed_ , for _devotion to the point of folly_ , for _unceasing, unending love_ ; they are not so different. Only a line or two. Gods only know you’ve moved a line or two, pressing your thumbs into the skin of the world to let it part like a wound for you and you (not) alone, watching the flame burn red red _red_ \- crimson, red as blood, red as hearts, red as your|his teeth in the outline of the world|wound -

These whispers on the edge of sleep are nothing like what you’ll ever take to be enough, but they are all you have, and you press to the edge of sleep like a fatted calf to the slaughter. Let it bleed you, for him. Let it strangle you, for him. Let it burn you and pierce you and tear you and teach you of a thousand thousand deaths, each one only a semblance and an attempt, and grow closer every time until the Isle doesn’t need any assistance to be yours. It will be here, always, and you will be everywhere and it will only be here. 

You dream of it oh so often, now. Those endless steps. Sometimes you think you can see him unfurling in the well, like a child, like a corpse drenched in unexistent flesh, like the blinding horizon, like a wish you don’t ever have to say out loud –

There is always a little more left to give.  
And you give it up every time.

What else are you supposed to do, for love?

* * *

ace of hungers.

Again you can’t sleep for hunger, a carved-out hollow in your stomach, like something is crawling its way up through your throat and taking you with it. It grows, lurching and reaching, until all you are is the hunger – but not yet, no, not yet. This is only the beginning of your cycle. So you pace yourself and smile like any other, of course, and you _know_ what you want but you can’t have it. Not yet. Giving yourself what you want would be the greatest folly you know.

You let the laudanum push you to sleep until you swear you can taste blood in your mouth. You smile, in the mornings, and ignore the questions about the screaming that used to fill the halls, the ones that run your throat raw if you let them - you don’t have neighbors anymore. None of them can be such bothers about it. The rooms have laid empty for months.

(Blood on your teeth. They had screamed, too, louder than you had in the grasp of dreams; you had pulled them apart, bit by bit, and told them how beautiful they might be if they could only _understand_. But you were so hungry. So, so hungry.

Maybe they could have known it like you do, but you were too hungry to give them the chance at all.)

This is always the easiest. Or maybe the hardest. There’s so little of _him_ in this unflavored _want want want_ that no matter how hard your insides twist and break you can’t reach him, not the way you want, not the way you _know_ you can. You can push the dreams to come if you hover, if you bleed, if you lie feverish caught between dreaming and waking: they circle you (not you, him, always him, you never bled so much, you never knew these walls, remember that, _remember_ that -)

(Who are you again? It’ll come back in a moment, you’re sure.   
It can’t be that important if you’ve lost track of it.  
Your teeth are too dull, your face too flat, to do anything right. Flightless. Always falling (for him) (towards the end) (faster and faster until you think you’ll break against the current) (but you never do) towards the center of the Earth, endlessly, trapped by harsh gravity -  
  
Still human, somehow, or something very close to it. No. This won’t do.)

They circle you, and they peel you apart (count every rib, count every finger, count every tendon and muscle and bone and watch as they take it; they strip your heart apart into thin sheets and the blood skips and sizzles, how are you alive, every second agonizing, _you_ are not alive and neither is he), and the pain peaks somewhere close to what you want it to be - nowhere near what it was -

You wake up, chest heaving, face flushed. Perhaps you can satisfy other hungers tonight, instead.

* * *

two of bats.

There is nothing you need to say. Those betrayers, false brothers, _it would all be well_ , promises, promises – the wax of the seal isn’t right. You can feel him, overlaid on you like a bad memory; _ammonia_ , he supplies, _blood, stagnant water_ , but you have no time. The wax isn’t right, but it is somewhat like enough -

Is he proud? Can he tell how people look at you now? You hope he is. You hope he can taste it through you, abomination that you are; guttered, empty creature that you are. 

You’ve never been very good at grieving what could be. But you’ve made candles of yourself, before, and those burn better than you do. Flesh to a flame has never been kind to either – too slow, too fragile, at the normal speed of things - so you make your own work for the story, and you tell the tale; you are no chandler, but you almost fancy you could be sometimes. You’ve the skill for it.

(You tear up the note and eat it. Still the traitor-brother sends them to you. You don’t know what he expects you to do with them - what, does he want you to eat the messenger? Too scrawny. He wouldn’t run fast enough for it to be any fun. And there’s none of that tugging hunger that comes with what you associate with _his_ decisions, none of that feeling like you’re playing spectator in your own skin, something else ready to break out of you like a tearing chrysalis.)

Paper and ink catch behind your teeth and run together like a bit or bridle. Tomorrow - tomorrow, you assist at Mahogany Hall. Their mistake. You can make words stronger than the ones you’re swallowing, and you can make them sweeter too, and ever so poisonous: no matter how fast the curtain comes down and they drag you away and out, sometimes there’s the screaming, the horror and pain of a crushed child or an amputated limb, of a truth too unbearable to let you look away.

Somebody out there will hear you. Perhaps you haven’t been working on your reputation enough, if they’ll still let you. Or maybe your work at false identities is bearing rotted|rotten|rotting fruit.

You will step out on that stage   
and they will hear you.

* * *

three of roses.

People say bloody-ivy is rare – well, they _say_ that, but it’s more theory than fact. You’ve your own ideas about manufactured rarity, of course, but every thought falls apart when you see the shapes those vines coil into on the walls, gardeners tearing at them with frantic speed and bloodied hands before people like you can come and see – it feels impossible to stop yourself without someone at your side to press fingers into the inset of your wrist and say _we really should be going, love -_

Being a scholar is infinitely beyond your purview. But sometimes you think you know the shape of it, the way you can recognize foreign shapes and blinding flame, how you can almost imagine shaping your throat around words no human tongue can create. Are those the symbols and the lines of it, trapped in the thorns, ready to be freed by your scrabbling hands and your blood on the wire? Someone is already screaming, and if nothing else you know it can’t be you; you haven’t screamed at these thorns for a long time – and you’re not even on them.

You’re watching. Your mouth is dry. Your teeth are shallow, dull things.

The gardeners are peeling someone else in a suit off the wall, hir arms a mass of torn skin and blood, and xe is screaming in the way of someone who has moved without being able to stop hirself. Those eyes are normally alert, calculating (because you’ve seen this person before, and like calls to like when it’s about people such as _you_ ), but there is no understanding in them here and now.   
(You have to look away. It’s not due to disgust, or anything similar; instead you’re wracked with something shaped like envy. That could be _you_ , pledging your blood to the writing in the wall, to him – but you were too slow this time.)

They’re on too much alert to let you press yourself to those vines. Maybe next time, and you can tie one tight around your reckless throat; pretend the rest will draw and quarter you when the gardeners look away, and let it kill you quick and clean.

* * *

four of eyes.

The people in the street won’t talk to you anymore. They won’t look you in the eyes. They won’t even _look_ at you. But they’re nothing to you – even when they scream, because your throat is raw and the Question burns in you like a fever, and you _do not stop._   
Hateful. Ignorant. Walking kindling, too stupid to know it’s already dead; would that flesh burned as easily as any candle-wick, you think, and can’t find even a distant reproach within your dead heart. You feel like –

You _don’t_ feel. That’s the point of it. You haven’t felt for a very long time.

( _What are you doing to yourself? Stop before you are ruined._ )

They cast their gaze up at you, and something pulls their eyes away. What do they think they’re going to find on your face that frightens them so? His teeth, his fangs, his _hunger_? Nothing that isn’t already _there_. At the best of times the meld between you is indistinguishable, memories of something that was so very many years ago fresh like an infection in your mind; at the worst of times it is a gaping wound and a void in the back of your head, nothing but a little ember of _might want / can’t have / betrayal_ whispering to you in your sleep.

But the people in the street can’t see into your dreams. They don’t see how you haven’t had your own dreams in years; it’s only the ones all Neath-dwellers receive, games and mirrors and burning sermons, and - the ones you can’t differentiate from - they’re nothing to you. These ghosts of people, formless flesh in the shape of a human being; they serve best as prey, and they jerk away at your touch, at your fingers wrapped around their wrists. (Skinny. Fragile. You could break them in a strong grip, you could shove a blade between the thin bones there and pin them like an insect, flay the skin from the muscle and bone; you could do so much to them, and they don’t even know how lucky they are, not to hurt.) You want their blood in your teeth.

Close. Closer. _Closer –_

* * *

five of lights.

There are things you know: ash on your hands, for one; the flicker-flame of candles, second, and the memory of running from what seemed like an inferno – nothing larger than a candle. You can’t do it. Even with so much of you changed and burnt away – you still can’t do it, not without your hands shaking and your breath catching in your throat.

Things you know: your hands are hot, too hot; your fingers are trailing ash and smoke and sparks; your throat hurts like you’ve been choking down thickened air; there is wax on your tongue. Things you know: Lyle’s Clothiers was in fine form and solid-built as ever, last time you passed it, days ago.

Things you know: the sign burning up across the alleyway from you used to say Lyle’s Clothiers, and the footprints behind you through the soot look like your own.

Things you don’t know: what day is it? And: how did you get here? And: what came over you so quickly and deeply, that you were pulled into the undertow until it’d had its fill?

And: what have you done?

(You can hear their voices, clamouring for you. Not long, now. Not long at all.)

* * *

six of pearls.

This is a little further, even, than the things that come before; this is an action no one but people like you will take, or will be willing to take. Once, you would have laughed at the very thought of it, you would have been disgusted, you might even have been horrified – but that’s all been forgotten. You were very thorough, in what you gave up at the Carnival, and sometimes even you can’t remember who and what you were before it.  
The Bucculent Dentist won’t look you in the face if you’re looking back. She stutters, she shivers, her voice snaps; but in the end you pay well, and she knows enough of your reputation and your bloody tastes that she has real reason to be afraid of saying no, for how long it could take her to make it off the slow boat. 

Set the teeth apart from your jaw and swallow them down (almost like you’ll have two mouths, nothing you could not devour, nothing you could not consume), and your pulse is traitor-slow, and the blood in your mouth is mostly your own when all is said and done. You’ll grow them _back_ , so there’s no need for silly little human worries like that.

The blood on the chair is wet and rich, and it’s hardly going to be set back inside you where it belongs, and if she had strapped you down for stability you would have torn yourself asunder to get free. There are some things not even he can mute, when the experience is almost-shared, and it would have to swallow you down and take you over to make it leave you be.

* * *

seven of words.

In the hours before dawn –

(this is a special sort of thing, you understand.   
It can hardly be considered _routine_.)

It’s just that sometimes, when the nightmares are too much and you can’t close your eyes anymore – you can go somewhere else, broken glass in your fingertips, the sun you’ll never feel again bright and warm, something else’s home that slides-and-slips into your skin and sets teeth on you from the inside. A familiar place that you’ll never remember. It’s not _your_ face that looks at you from beyond your door, when the mirror shatters, for all that it is; you were very young once, before all of this, and them – with their short hair and bright eyes – they’re not real. Neither are you.

Not that things like that matter, here. 

(There is water in your lungs, shredding through you, freezing cold and sorrow-scaled; these temptations are no kindness. You spit up saltwater and well-water, moon-milk and grave-wax and blood, and maybe a couple of teeth. They’re not your teeth. Yours aren’t that sharp.

Yet.)

What are the laws? You know them like you know your breath. It’s only fitting. You will eat your fill in this dream, and you will set your teeth in your own flesh, and it’ll only be more scars when you wake – but one more scar, or even two or three, what is that? Compared to love, compared to what he suffered, what sort of pretense at sacrifice is that at all? Your skin can always take a little more; pain or pleasure, it’s all the same, now.

* * *

knave of regrets.

The world rots where you walk.

_(for they are hungry, they are thirsty -)_

It’s metaphor, perhaps, probably; there are no crops withering under your tread, no crumbling holes threatening to swallow carts and carriages and people, no spots where your footsteps have broken a hole in the walls of the world. But you have done so much _harm_ to the people who make up your foundation, and even as distanced and shattered and broken as you are, you can still acknowledge – they shouldn’t love you. The words die in your throat when you look at them, faux apologies and true ones alike, because you are so _hungry_ and you _want_ to drive them out.   
You want.   
You _want_. 

You want with a need that isn’t yours at all. 

But the tinder is needed to spark the flame. It’s as much a need as breathing, to betray, to twist the knife, to flense the heart -

did they always look at you that way?

  
_Do not forget, do not forgive._

_Do not forget, do not forgive._

_**DO NOT FORGET.**_

These are walking corpses in the streets. 

It would be so easy, to turn them to their best cause; meat for the butcher, tallow for the chandler.  
The flicker in the back of your mind is violent-bright, and the laugh is hysterical, bubbling out between your teeth and driving you hoarse with the force of it; none of them can look you in the face, but they’ll scrawl on your walls and break your windows and lock their doors when you pass – like cowards, like toys, like automatons – 

None of them understand. Not a single one. 

(But they will **remember** you.)

* * *

knight of feasts.

It wasn’t always an open secret, that you are what you are. Once – once, you passed for human better; you spoke like any other, you smiled like any other.  
Then there was the Carnival, and the lady of the crossroads, and your nails dug deep into the skin of the world to turn it inside out; and everyone forgot you had ever been anything but this, and it was useless to pretend.

So – your appetites. You tried to deny them, once, young and stupid and foolish with perceived victory over your hunger; and you woke up wrist-deep in a man’s ribcage with your mouth full of the viscera that made a home at the part of him, and the hollow pit in your stomach pretending it was sated, and you never tried to hold it off like that again. You indulge.   
You are a parlor tale, you are a story not told in polite company – because you can still _pretend_ to those humanities, and leave polite society guessing over whether your tastes (rich and raw and red, warm and beating) run to such dangerous degrees.

But you are so hungry. You are so hungry, all the time; it is not a passion, it is not a want, it is not a need. You have forgotten what it means to not be hungry, and to not hurt with it.

_(You are made hollow.)_

It is a gaping hole at the center of you, carved out to let him sit there (ever more uncomfortably literal since his _gift_ to you, because there is a lovely little jar in your house that smells like formaldehyde and well-water, and it holds: everything that should have been keeping you alive, fitted together in a tight caress, capped with holly-berries in some sick festivity), and all that will do to suit it is – together we will redistribute these pains.

There was no choice of yours in what to sacrifice. But – what is that, in the grand scheme of things? You’ll never see the sunlight again, no matter what, even without this. He can take as he pleases, and you’ll still never know a fraction of what he felt.   
And you’d give it up, if only he asked.

What else are you supposed to do, for love?

* * *

(There was something in you, once, something soft and wounded and keening, wishing for some sort of absolution; but you ripped it out of yourself seven times over. That was nothing of his and all of yours, and it died the way it deserved, a sacrifice to the only thing that matters.)

(There is no freedom. There is no ending.

There is only you, and him, and the sort of pain that goes on and on, and you will never be rid of any of it.)

(No one will remember you, once you’re gone. Doesn’t that just make a perfect symmetry?)

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this on Halloween 2018 and finished it New Year's Eve 2019. Don't be like me. (Hilariously enough, my _other_ Seekfic was published December 30th 2018, so, like... I guess this is my tradition now?? New Year Seekfic???
> 
> This is intended to be the same POV character as [SURVIVE, SCARRED], albeit set before they lost their identity and went crazy and went North. They've been Seeking the Name for six years! Things are kind of fucked up in their head! They wish they still had their organs, but what can you do.


End file.
